Does anyone have any recommendations for a better, more economically reasonable printing service than Zazzle? The sheer cost of it is prohibitively expensive, and makes it tough to imagine small businesses or artists being able to afford using their service.
Pandora spent much more effort attempting to get me to sign-up (and re-sign-up) than they ever did trying to retain me.
The customer service experience was harrowing, featured slow response times, an indifferent attitude to my issues and a wholly inadequate resolution leading me to quit the service.
Every so often I would see news coverage about them struggling and all I could think was, "guess things on the customer service side haven't changed."
I feel this way about Sirius/XM. It was such a hassle to deal with them every 6 months or a year to get a better rate when it came up for renewal. It just didn't feel like it was worth it anymore. And once I finally left they would snail mail me offers to come back constantly. I couldn't help but think that all that money spent mailing me to come back could have been spent just providing a more affordable service in the first place.
I was about to say, if naggy and poor customer service is a hallmark of Pandora, then becoming a part of SiriusXM will be a match made in heaven (hell?). When I finally decided to drop SiriusXM and called in to cancel my account, it took me something like 20 minutes worth of begging the phone rep to just never let me have to pay their company money ever again. They spent the entire time questioning how I used the service and trying to forcibly get me to sign up for some lowered rate for x months. I will never purchase something from them again.
Just be ready for them to hike your rate without any type of alert after the initial period expires. This applies even to gifted subscriptions like the one I was given for Christmas. The customer service was...unsympathetic.
I don't have the time to jump through hoops to maintain promotional pricing for a NYT subscription. Maybe a sufficient long term discount would be attractive, or unbundling content. The NY Times just doesn't offer enough value to warrant the asking price for my tastes.
Kristi from Braintree here. Admittedly, our legacy bank relationships left us as the middle man to their risk departments. This may be what you are referring to when you mention the "ludicrously strict risk team." This is no longer the case. Starting with the launch of our instant product, we brought risk in house. We are able to use our years of experience working with startups to develop risk processes that help us build relationships, not get in your way.
Key to my application is I can write a good letter and CV/resumé, whereas most people can't. They also don't know how to research their industry: finding the right companies, working out who to address the letter to, how to followup a few months later (or by phone a week later) without sounding pushy.
So, your idea has "legs" :) Somewhere between a virtual personal assistant, a resumé-writing and mailing service, and a campaign planner for job seekers. I want royalties ;)
Quite contrary -- there are a lot of people who are able to handwrite really nicely, especially among women. Since it's so commonplace and it does not require any training (since everybody got one in primary education), you can pay really low wage for such services.
Comparing Nanotech, Education, and future IT to other revolutionary technologies is interesting but nothing radically new. It can be especially difficult to direct money to these new frontiers when the infrastructure of yesterday is becoming increasingly potholed.
Forward into uncertainty as a means of raising our ceiling? Or stand our ground and try to raise the floor?
